Holli Carrell “Lot’s Wife”

On “Lot’s Wife”

Apostasies, my debut poetry collection, took almost ten years to write. During that time, there were long stretches when I didn’t write at all and then agonized over my lack of writing. For a long time, I believed the (ableist and untrue) narrative I had been told that a “real” writer has to create new work every day—up at dawn, finishing masterpieces by noon. In fact, “Lot’s Wife” and the final poems I wrote for Apostasies came immediately after one of my longest writing breaks, from 2021 to 2023, when I wrote hardly anything at all but read very intensely. I now see these periods of reflection and nonwriting as essential to my creative practice.

Many of the concerns in “Lot's Wife” are representative of the larger themes in Apostasies: gender-based violence against women and girls and its religious justification, not only in Mormonism—the religion I was raised in—but also in other communities; religious control and obedience, “submission” to male authority, the archival silencing of women, and feminist rebellion and resistance. At the time of writing the poem, I was thinking and reading a lot about spiritual doubt, pondering how it was depicted to me as a child as a moral failing and sin, rather than as a characteristic of intellectual curiosity and self-awareness. Having had no feminist or queer role models in my conservative upbringing, I found myself yearning to trace or reclaim a feminist matriarchal lineage of doubt and disobedience. This led me back to the biblical story of Lot’s Wife, one of the first examples of “naughty women” I had been warned against as a young girl in Sunday School.

What surprised me after revisiting the scriptural story as an adult were the details I didn’t receive as a child, one being the implication that Lot trafficked his daughters to his neighbors to appease their sexual appetites. Although I am not a mother, I found myself thinking about how I might respond to such an action by my husband, and I suppose the poem initially sprang from that fury, disgust, and sense of violation. The poem came quickly and really fell into its groove once I found the longer prose line and allowed myself to imagine and embody the sensory details surrounding the moment of Lot’s wife fleeing—what would it have been like to witness an entire population ruthlessly sacrificed by a merciless God, and be expected, too, to follow a man with such little regard for his daughters’ well-being? I view the nameless woman’s turning as an act of protest and rebellion, a gesture of strength rather than one of weakness—a deliberate refusal to participate in heteropatriarchal violence at its root.

As far as the poem’s placement in the manuscript, it also gestures at a thematic turning near the end of the book—something I didn’t intentionally plan while writing, but a surprise that worked out well during arrangement. Apostasies is about being disempowered—sexually, spiritually, and intellectually—and the hard and lengthy process of reuniting body and mind, reclaiming one’s self, and finding identity. I see myself and my life in Lot’s wife’s turning.